“When I returned to designing, I was taken aback by how everyone was seeing shows through their phones,” John Galliano said at a preview this week. The Maison Margiela Artisanal show reflected that phone-camera/social-media phenomenon literally. As Galliano’s collection walked, audience members were asked to turn their cameras to flash—each capturing their own images of fabrics as they strobed and refracted into high-tech prismatic rainbows as they moved. “Freezing the glamour of the accidental, the magical moment,” Galliano called it—another stage in the progression of his thoughts about “dressing in haste.”

Speed, technology, and the fast-forwarding fractured chaos of modern consciousness were the subtexts of this couture collection. It was formatted as a double-vision experience: The human eye showed one reality, the screen another—the before and after are paired in the photographs you see here. Well, isn’t that the way we live today, our brains trained to judge every event and every environment according to how they’ll look on Instagram?

So far, social media has impacted fashion houses by forcing them to alter sets to make shows Instagram-friendly, but this was a long step further, affecting the actual R & D of clothes and materials. “It’s quite scientific,” Galliano explained. “We recorded every moment of what we were making, then looked at the photographs and altered what we were doing according to the photos.” The reaction of polyurethane to camera flash and the illusionary visuals that happen when holographic material is layered over polka dots or chinoiserie jacquards were all factored in.